Portfolio for Delfina Foundation
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Untitled (waxing floor machine drawing #1)
Powder graphite on paper
70x100 cm
2007
Untitled (waxing floor machine drawing #2)
Powder graphite on paper
100x140cm
2007
These works were made by mapping the studio floor using the paper size as a unit of measure. This way, I worked all the floor relocating the same sheet of paper. Drawing #1 had the floor full of scraps and junk; drawing #2 is a scale of the studio area and had the junk removed. Working tables are represented as squares of pasted paper behind the drawing surface. This was a collective studio in Rio de Janeiro of around 100 sq.m.
Tacet
Group performance | carbon on paper and sound
Dimensions variable
2008-ongoing
Click here for a video segment of Tacet, performed in 2012
Tacet starts as a musical performance of improvised music, where instruments are prepared with Japanese paper and carbon film. This makes the gestures and strokes that the musicians make in order to make music are retained as marks on paper. The paper also works as a kind of musical instrument, an add-on, as it alters the original sound of the instrument and has its own sonic possibilities. The recorded performance is played in the exhibition space when the drawings are exhibited, but the speakers are hidden behind some drawings, behind the wall. As the sound is mixed in 5.1, the sound — which is played in a low volume — seems to walk around the room, going from one drawing to another. The drawings are installed in a different configuration each time, adapting to the space it is given.
O Samba ainda não chegou (Samba hasn’t arrived yet)
Ink on cut and pasted paper
Dimensions variable
2016
Samba… is a work that was ignited by something I heard when invited to do a show in London in 2015: “you are not the Brazilian people expect”. As I live in the southernmost state of the country, far from the tropical cliché fetishized by non-brazilians, this idea was both strange and familiar. The work intents to articulate an idea of expecting for something that will never come, this Modernist-Niemeyer aesthetic that one can find in places like São Paulo, Rio and Brasilia, but hardly in the south. I think many people still expect this to happen and make us more integrated — kind of longing for a future that will never come, that already passed. Athos Bulcão’s geometric tiles, famous for their use around the country capital, are put along with the popular 1970’s geometric patterns people had in their homes, in a kind of improvised repair. The vegetation, the tropical exuberance, is also different in this region. In the work, it appears as melancholic, exhausted. The work also alludes to a ruin — the ruin that the years under Bolsonaro’s government are transforming the country. Singer Caetano Veloso once stated that in Brazil “everything is under construction and it’s already a ruin”, and the work’s title is also a line from one of his songs.
Shelterruin/ruínaabrigo
Watercolor pencil on paper
56x90 cm
Installation view at Belmacz Gallery, London; finished artwork after a month of weather exposure
2014
Installed as the gallery’s entrance mat, the drawing depicted a collection of William Morris’s designs. A laser-cut acrylic plaque with cobogó motifs (a kind of shallow tile invented by Brazilian modernist architecture) placed above the drawing was where the visitors wiped their feet, unaware of the fact it was an artwork. The humidity that is typical of London worked on the watercolor pencil drawing, making both Morris’ and the cobogó’s patterns melt.
se algo, ainda que por instantes, surgisse, sumisse
Acrylic and graphite on paper
152x100cm
2022
hora em que o vento de estrelas extintas assovia
Acrylic and graphite on canvas
170 x 220 cm
2022
mas uma parte sua era luz
Acrylic and graphite on canvas
150x100cm
2022
tem dias que faz sol até de noite
Acrylic on canvas
140 x 200 cm
2021
de modo evasivo mudar o assunto do sonho
Acrylic on canvas
150x100cm
2022
Drawing (to Laura and Munir)
In situ, 1m x 40m x 7m, anamorphic line
2017
An anamorphic drawing made by removing the leaves of grass at the entrance of Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos. The polygon looks parallel at one point only, and as people walked into it, they could feel it “opening”. A drawing that you enter and feel with your body.
Night drawing
Watercolor on grass
In situ, 50cm x 7m
2015
Made during the residency program at Vermont Studio Center
I wanted to make a watercolor drawing with the purest water I could find, so I chose dew. Bought all the “Night blue” watercolor pencils at the supplies store and made a monochrome on paper as big as the pencils allowed me. It stayed face up all night outside, and it was soaked in the first hour of the morning, when I rubbed it on the grass.
Studio Haiku
Wrapped books
Site-specific at Gestual Gallery, dimensions variable
2015
A work using only what was available at the gallery — this is their publications shelf. The openings on the books’s spines reveal letters that form an awkward poem, roughly translated as:
The picture (painting) has fallen
It deserved to
It doesn’t matter
The tamer
Vídeo, 1’50”, mute, loop
Made during the residency program at Vermont Studio Center
2015
Video on Vimeo
A big piece of paper falls in front of me in the studio one very hot afternoon, in this exact position. As I walked around it, surprised by its shape, I realized it looked like some animal. I positioned my chair with the help of a bottle of water, and the fan by the window was making the paper moves. I see it as an allegory of the studio work, but also as a reminder to keep oneself open to odd situations. Vermont was full of them.
Five scenes for unread sentences
18’50”, audio
2019
Bandcamp link
Sound piece commission for an exhibition. I had Ricardo de Carli as a collaborator, where we used a very sparse set of objects to generate all sounds. Mainly, a small drum kit, a bass guitar and two books, as the exhibition was about artist’s publications. All was played and looped live, so we performed in the studio while listening to the loops stacking over each other.
The radio was always on in the kitchen (or) the hammer of the gods
8’10”, video, sound
A kettle boils, and its whistle is captured by two microphones, which run through a series of guitar effects, that I operate and manipulate the original sound, set in a rock’n’roll cliché environment, the rehearsal studio.
From the shoulders of Giants
Artist's book
25x17cm closed | 25cm x 20meters open
2010
I have the habit of writing and highlighting all books I read (most of the titles of my drawings and paintings are from those highlights). This artist's book mirrors one specific book from my library, with all its marks, transforming my selections into a long drawing.
The fold-out is made of tracing paper so one can use it above another book and read it through my selections, as some kind of oracle driven by chance.
Call me Ishmael, 2015
Dyptich, 150x500cm each part, acrylic and pastel on paper
A drawing of the horizon line — a line of abstraction, that exists only in our imagination. As sky and land/sea never encounter each other, I physically separated them, in a tiny exhibition space, making the horizon line suggested across the room.
